Do women have too many choices in current society?

I think men and women both have more choices on most levels.

Anhata
www.familynaturally.com
Your Family's General Store, Naturally

I don't think we have too many choices. I think we have hard choices, though. There are so many opportunities available that it can be hard to prioritize life to accommodate the things that truly matter and the things that it would be fun to do.

Because I think in some ways we all have too many choices, men and women. That's not to say I favor some artificial restriction, but I do think the American motto of "You Can Do Anything!" has become for most of us "You Must do Everything! Well! Stylishly! and Quickly, if you please!" Not to mention the creeping relativity of, "we all have our own opinion on what's right," without considering that some opinions may be more informed than others.

Of course it's easy for me too say: my horizons have always been very wide open, and so have those of my peers in social class, education, etc. I supoose I might think differently if that were not the case.

I haven't exactly voted yet, but it does seem that women (and men to a lesser extent) feel obliged to do everything at once simply because the option is available to them. It's there so I must have it/do it... I like that anybody has these choices on the one hand, but all it has succesfully done is destroy families and leave women more bewildered and exhausted than ever before. Do I believe that women should all be forced to stay at home?? Of course not. But I believe somebody ought to stay home if there are kids, if it's at all possible, because the choice to go out and work has been so destructive simply because nobody really took the place of those homemakers of old. If women went to work nobody stayed home to do their jobs so they have to do those and often less well than they would have done.

(not always of course... some women are better homemakers than I am in spite of working as well, and some women and/or men don't have a choice but to work. Just thought I'd better say that!).

so I'm still sitting on the fence on this vote. Will probably eventually be a 'don't know'.

Kerri.

Women as a group have more choices than before. If we each had all of those choices available to us, it probably would be overwhelming. However, women as individuals usually have life circumstances which limit their actual choices to a more manageable number.

I think we do have too many choices. Marriage? Live-in? Children? No children? Career? Stay home? Stay home with children? Part-time? Flex time? Daycare? Family care? Babysitter? Head of household? Single mom with nowhere job....welfare? School? Volunteer? Homeschool? Public school? Breastfeed? Bottle? Cloth? Disposable? Late in life parenting? Raise grandchildren who are being neglected? Pill? Depo? Tubal ligation? Talk partner into vasectomy? Take care of aging parents or nursing home?

Yeah, I think we have way too many choices!

On paper, we've got all kinds of choices. I won't list them, since we've already got at least one pretty comprehensive list. But when you get down to the actual choices that any one of us is able to make, it's pretty slim pickings.

On paper, for example, we all certainly have the option of working outside the home, working inside the home (primarily homemaking, or some combination of working outside the home while at home and homemaking), or taking some time off after the kids are born. In reality, most of us do not have access to the paid maternity/paternity leave that is a matter of course in most of the industrialised world that makes more than one option viable (absent substantial savings, ancestral wealth, or a spouse who makes a really good living).

Politically, in the US, we can certainly support and vote for almost any party we want, but on the national level the only choice that our electoral system allows any chance of affecting anything is between two styles of ad copy for almost identical policies. Certainly, we can opt (for example) to get our international belligence and domestic neglect with a side of either Medium or Extra Hot Homophobia. Despite few people being wild about either side dish, it's included in your order, no substitutions permitted.

Plus, on a more general level, women in American society are additionally constrained in their apparently vast options by the fact that we can't cough without it becoming an ideological minefield. Often enough, we're damned if we do, damned if we don't. Don't get married and you're turning your back on a cherished social institution. Get married and you're at least potentially selling out to a patriarchal power structure. Get married to a *woman* and you're responsible for everything bad that happens in North America, from crime to hurricanes. Get divorced, no matter how intolerable your marriage is, and you're ruining the fabric of American society (and are responsible for increasing crime rates and ensuring that your child will become a crackhead before the age of ten). Work after marriage (and especially after having children) - no matter how necessary it is to survival - and you have to listen to voices from various quarters telling you you're doing grievous harm both to your own children and to our otherwise so humane society. Don't work outside the home - even if it's clearly by choice and your feminist bona fides are well-established - and you might be hearkening a return to the Middle Ages (or the 1950s, which was basically the same trip anyway). Do something traditionally male, and you're congratulated by some and told you're going against God and nature and all sorts of other convenient precepts by others. Do something tradtionally female, and the situation reverses itself.

We do have a lot of choices compared to a lot of places (one shudders to think, for example, of Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan under the Taliban and the equally repressive Northern Alliance), but I don't think we'll ever be anywhere near "too many" until we actually are able to benefit from the theoretical options we supposedly have now.